Ronelle Carolissen

‘Ah, but the whiteys love to talk about themselves’: discomfort as a pedagogy for change

This article reports on an interdisciplinary and collaborative educational module prepared for fourth‐year Psychology and Social Work students at two higher education institutions in the Western Cape, South Africa. The aim of the module was to provide students with the opportunity to experience learning across the boundaries of institution, discipline, language, race and class, and to provide the team with data to enhance understanding of how students grapple with issues of difference. The study was based on data obtained from student texts produced in response to the final reflective essay assignment. The texts provided valuable insights into how students, some of whom appeared to come into contact with peers from different socioeconomic backgrounds for the first time, grappled with themselves in relation to ‘the other’. A theoretical framework based on the notion of a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ and the complementary relationship of recognition and distribution, was used to explicate the data. The data revealed that there are cognitive as well as affective dimensions in learning about difference. It suggested that a pedagogical intervention can enhance what students learn about difference, but that this depends on various factors: pedagogical factors, and factors pertaining to the students’ own prior experience and cultural capital. The analysis of the assignments suggested that power differentials and inequality in terms of material and cultural resources can limit the transformational character of such initiatives.

Community, self and identity: participatory action research and the creation of a virtual community across two South African universities

Fourth year students in psychology and social work from two South African universities worked together across boundaries of race and class in a course which required them to engage in a personal reflexive way with issues of community and identity. A combination of face-to-face workshops and online tutorial groups was used. The course was demanding of both staff and students, but preliminary analysis suggests that the creation of virtual communities may be of benefit in assisting students in their preparation for the challenges of working in a diverse and unequal society.

Bringing the social into pedagogy: unsafe learning in an uncertain world

The paper describes a collaborative curriculum development project implemented over 3 years at 2 universities in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The project involved a short module in which students in their fourth year of study interacted and learnt collaboratively across the boundaries of institution, discipline, race and social class, about the concepts of community, self and identity. The pedagogic approach adopted is described, as well as the responses of the students, and a brief reflection on some of the learning outcomes attained. The paper considers the learning processes which the curriculum development team experienced, and suggests that in order to facilitate learning for an ‘uncertain world’, the curriculum designers, too, need to engage in learning processes in which they make themselves vulnerable, mirroring some of the learning processes they expect the students to undergo.

'It doesn't matter who or what we are, we are still just people': Strategies used by university students to negotiate difference

South Africa, after decades of apartheid, continues to be a highly segregated society. Higher education institutions need to prepare students for work in such a divided society. Recent work on inter-group contact has stressed the importance of taking into account peoples interpretation and meanings about contact in particular contexts, and the need for contact to involve dialogue about socio-historical situations. This article reports on a collaborative project involving fourth-year psychology and social work students from two universities. The project facilitated the interaction of students from diverse racialised and classed backgrounds. A combination of a thematic and discourse analysis of their online interaction identified strategies students used when negotiating and interacting with one another on issues of difference. The analysis identified ways of referring to difference, strategies for negotiating difference, and ways of managing the conversations about difference. These indicate differing levels of engagement. Dialogue designed to educate students about difference requires interventions that make students aware of these strategies and their implications.

Community Psychology is for poor black people : Pedagogy and teaching of community psychology in South Africa.

The term “community” holds historical connotations of political, economic, and social disadvantage in South Africa. Many South African students tend to interpret the term “community” in ways that suggest that community and community psychology describe the experiences of exclusively poor, black people. Critical pedagogies that position the teaching process as a transformative activity and that challenge student perceptions about the status quo are central in teaching community psychology. This article uses the subdiscipline of community psychology to discuss the importance of pedagogy. It uses a module that was presented at Stellenbosch University (SU) in the Western Cape, South Africa, as an illustrative example. The module was taught collaboratively with the social work department at the University of the Western Cape. Forty-five psychology students from a historically white university (SU) and 50 social work students from a historically black university (UWC) engaged in face-to-face workshops and virtual (e-learning) assignments that interrogated notions of the self, community, and identity. Final student essays were analysed qualitatively for themes illustrating aspects of the human capabilities approach to pedagogy adopted in this project.

‘Your Mind is the Battlefield’: South African Trainee Health Workers Engage with the Past

A key problematic in any post‐conflict society is how to account for the injustices of the past, while at the same time making a space for the development of a shared future. In South Africa, there is an increasing demand for health and social service workers, who are required to address the impact of an unjust past upon individuals and communities. Educators of health and social service workers are thus faced with the complexities of finding pedagogical practices that would allow students to recognize these past injustices and their impact on present problems. This article looks at data taken from a teaching project across two South African universities, where students from three professions engaged in online discussions about their personal, social and future professional identities. During some of these discussions, students spontaneously entered into disagreements about the relevance or irrelevance of the past in modern‐day South Africa. The data indicates considerable reluctance on the part of some students to talk about the past and its relevance to the present. The authors suggest that while talking about the past is both difficult and potentially painful for students, it is nevertheless the responsibility of educators to facilitate such discussions among trainee professionals.

Removing the Splinters from Our Own Eyes: A Commentary on Identities and Power in South African Community Psychology

When we express concern about the liberation of ‘others’, we may ignore our own practices and how they maintain oppression amongst ourselves. This article highlights some theoretical and practical omissions in academic community psychology in South Africa that contribute to the sub-discipline further excluding the groups most marginalized within South African academia. As in other countries (Nelson and Prilleltensky, 2005), community psychology in South Africa defined itself as anti-mainstream and anti-oppressive and thus on the margins of mainstream psychology. Social justice and a focus on the needs of the marginalized are seen as central. Yet critiques of South African community psychology abound. Community psychology is viewed by some as an American product that reproduces conventional notions of power and profession (Painter and TerreBlanche, 2004). The emphasis on the ‘marginal’, paradoxically, reinforces stereotypical views of community psychology as reserved for black expertise and poor black consumers of service (Carolissen, 2006; Ngonyama ka Sigogo and Modipa, 2004). This emphasis on race as a primary cipher in South African community psychology may also obscure the component of gender, which is central to international understandings of community psychology (Bond and Mulvey, 2000). Moreover, much thinking about difference among South African psychologists is marked by binaries such as black or white, oppressed or privileged, without due consideration of how categories interact (Carolissen, 2008). Similarly, race and gender are implicitly

Epistemological resistance towards diversality: teaching community psychology as a decolonial project

In contexts of political instability and change, the value of disciplinary knowledges and the processes that constituted them is often questioned. Psychology is not exempt from this process. Little South African work has illustrated what teaching for decoloniality may mean in South African psychology. We draw on examples of curriculum design in community psychology from the Universities of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and Stellenbosch, three large South African public universities, in an attempt to surface what we regard as the decolonial frameworks that underpin their development and delivery. Capacities for reflexivity and the ability to hold multiple epistemologies encourage economies of knowledge that may prevent abyssal thinking, while contributing to cognitive justice and minimising opportunities for epistemicide. Some challenges to our pedagogy involve the potential for romanticising decoloniality.

Addressing dualisms in student perceptions of a historically white and black university in South Africa

Abstract Normative discourses about higher education institutions may perpetuate stereotypes about institutions. Few studies explore student perceptions of universities and how transformative pedagogical interventions in university classrooms may address institutional stereotypes. Using Plumwood’s notion of dualism, this qualitative study analyses unchallenged stereotypes about students’ own and another university during an inter-institutional collaborative research and teaching and learning project. The project was conducted over 3 years and 282 psychology, social work and occupational therapy students from a historically black and white institution in South Africa, participated in the study. Both black and white students from differently placed higher education institutions display prejudices and stereotypes of their own and other institutions, pointing to the internalisation and pervasiveness of constructions and hegemonic discourses such as whiteness and classism. It is important to engage with subjugated student knowledges, in the context of transformative pedagogical practices, to disrupt dominant views and cultivate processes of inclusion in higher education.

Gender, post-truth populism and higher education pedagogies

Across varying global contexts, significant feminist contribution has been demonstrated through gains in education, such as the high level of female participation in higher education in many countries worldwide (Leathwood and Read 2009). Policies of access and equity have contributed to growing diversity in higher education, and female students have increasingly out numbered male students in many higher education contexts, leading in some cases to processes of ‘gender mainstreaming’ (David 2016a). However, the recent rise of populism in some regions of the world, together with the apparent resonance of ‘post-truth’ narratives, suggests an emerging formation of power concerned with the undoing of hard-won gains in relation to gender and other intersecting forms of inequality and difference. Increased incidences of the public articulation of misogynistic and racist discourses (particularly via social media) and the apparent legitimation of these practices in some high-profile instances (including the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump), point to the ongoing and urgent need for feminist critique, as well as wider social movements for women’s and LGBTQI rights and equalities. This indeed has led to new social movements, such as #metoo against sexual violence and harassment, aiming to empower women to take a stand against institutionalized sexism. This has been taken up by feminist scholars to explore